MMOs and game design

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patch 3.3

Enchanters in WoW have it great. They provide a service that is required by every single raider – one enchant on each item, replaced every time an item is replaced. And they also have the sole means of producing their own raw materials. So if you want to buy an enchantment, you have two choices:

– Either buy it direct from an enchanter or buy the scroll of enchantment from the auction house

– Buy raw materials from an an enchanter/auction house, and pay someone to make the enchant with them

This is the only profession in WoW which is the sole supplier of both raw materials and finished items. A lot of people level enchanting on an alt and use it solely to break down unwanted items into materials to sell. (I have an alt enchanter, so I’m not just complaining about being cut out of this market because I’m not.) Because enchanters hold the monopoly on disenchanting, groups often ask them (if there is one in the group) to disenchant unwanted bind-0n-pickup items which turns them into materials that can be rolled for and traded.

The big problem with enchanting is that so many of the potential raw goods are wasted. Every time someone sells an unwanted green drop to the vendor, it’s a waste of enchanting material. Every time an enchanter in a group doesn’t disenchant unwanted blue drops, it’s a waste of enchanting material. You don’t see this so much with ore, herbs, leather, and cloth. If people gather or collect those and don’t need them, they get sold on the auction house.

But try selling unwanted green items on the auction house? No one buys. Enchanters have cheaper ways to acquire dust which usually involve finding something that is cheap to craft , then making a ton and disenchanting them. It might be that they’d buy green items if the profit margin was large enough, but actually vendors are happy to pay a few gold for the items too, and they’re expensive to list. (Unlike enchanting materials, which you can list on the AH for free.)

What this all ends up meaning is that if you aren’t an enchanter, you have no way to gain the full potential from your unwanted magic item (and you will have TONS because they give them out like candy as quest rewards). You’ll still have to pay the enchanter twice, once when you buy the raw materials and again when you pay for the actual finished enchantment.

In patch 3.3, it will be easier for groups to disenchant unwanted drops if there is an enchanter in the group. Enchanters have been unhappy about this because there isn’t even an option to ask the enchanter if they want to do it. If you have someone in your group with that craftskill at a high enough level, then there will be an option to automatically disenchant and distribute the resulting materials when an item drops. (I think it goes need/greed/disenchant.)

The only reason an enchanter might object to this is because they want to keep their monopoly on raw materials and keep the profits high (or because they can’t be bothered, which the new patch will fix). Why else would they let a valuable raw material go to be sold to a vendor because they’re unwilling to disenchant?

But I think this doesn’t go far enough.

Really there should be disenchanting NPCs in the major cities. If people want to cash in their unwanted magical items for dust, let them do it. And enchanters, like tailors, could simply have the chance to proc extra shards and dust when they do the disenchanting themselves.

That means it would still be worth keeping that disenchanting alt and it would still be profitable to disenchant items yourself. Enchanters would still retain the skill-perk of being able to enchant their rings. But fewer green items would be wasted, the tradeskill would be easier and cheaper to level because there would be more materials around, and non-enchanters wouldn’t get gouged all over the place — it might even encourage more people to buy enchants even if they don’t raid.

Also, like inscription, they should let enchanters trade in current tier dust for lower level dust. That would encourage people to put up more lower level enchants, or make more dust available for people levelling the tradeskill.

Imagine that you have had a flash forward in time, to an alternate future. In this future, Blizzard’s planned LFG changes have gone live. How will your game change?

You level up through a series of levelling zones, queuing for level appropriate instances as you go. You’ll likely not find one immediately you start to look but hopefully it won’t take too long, and when your instance comes up you will immediately get ported there with your 4 new friends who could be from any server in your battlegroup. You may never find out where the instance entrance actually is in the gameworld, if it even has one. You don’t need to talk to the other people in your group if you don’t want to – you won’t ever meet them again.

When you reach max level you can sit in the expansion-appropriate city for the rest of your endgame. Every day you can log in, queue up for the random dungeon daily quest and the random daily battleground and mess around with the auction house while you wait for the group to fill. Again, you’ll be ported directly to the instance or battleground when the group is ready. You can even queue for the random weekly raid instance if you have a bit more time and feel like a change of pace – in patch 3.3 the random raid group will only work for people on your server but surely if it is successful then it will also be expanded to the battlegroup.

If anyone in your random group turns out to be a jerk or a useless twat then the other four can vote to kick them out.

Maybe in each patch Blizzard will add in a new area with some daily quests if you feel like a breath of virtual fresh air. And if you’d rather do things old style and group with people on your server, there will be a LFG global channel (in cities) where you can compare achievements and put together those 10-man class PUGs.

My current thoughts in summary: A lot of people will benefit from this (people who don’t like feeling forced to be part of a community will be cheering). The game will be improved for many. And it could be so fundamentally game changing to the community that I don’t know where it will lead. We’ll have to wait and try it out and see. So my thoughts right now are phrased as questions.

Is this virtual heaven?

For some people, this will be a dream come true. While the LFG can never be greater than the sum of its parts (ie. you’ll still have the same people in the pool), it could benefit anyone who:

Likes PUGs and would like a bigger group of people to PUG with.

Don’t want to be part of a community but still want to do group activities

Don’t like travelling outside your city of choice, either because you think it’s a waste of time or just don’t like it

Wants to run lower level instances but finds that there aren’t enough people on their server — but there might be enough people on the battlegroup

So really, most people could benefit, depending on how good the group matching tool is.

The new system will now work to match at least one experienced player for the assigned dungeon with less experienced players in the group.

This quote in particular makes me nervous (call me harsh but boosting other people’s undergeared alts through heroics isn’t my idea of a fun time, friends excepted), but at the end of the day you’ll still be able to arrange groups old-style using the LFG channel if you want to know in advance who you will be with.

Those of us on servers who have really good PUG communities right now will lose out, though. I’d comfortably say that 9/10 of my PUGs are really pleasant experiences at the moment. Argent Dawn is a great place to run a PUG. That can basically only get worse if we introduce more battlegroups into the mix. But I suppose that’s what happens when you even people out – a lot of other players will benefit from having well behaved AD players in their groups now.

Or is it the end of the virtual world and the server community?

Server communities have the same issue as social players in general. They work because some people love them and work very hard to pull them together, and lots of other people don’t care but will participate if the work is done for them and the rewards are there. Together, the people who do care and the people who aren’t bothered but will go along with it make up the server community.

So what happens if all the people who aren’t bothered are given an easier way to get to the group content that they want? (Remember, they don’t hate the server community, they just don’t care either way.) But server communities have been valuable for people. By running server-based PUGs, new players can mix with existing ones. It has been one of the standard ways that people find guilds (or guilds find people).

Do most players even care that their game takes place in a virtual world or would they really rather sit in Dalaran and bitch on the trade channel until their next instance or battleground or raid comes up?

The sad thing about the players who say that they don’t care is that they won’t find out whether or not they really do until it is too late. Maybe the most hardcore gamist won’t miss seeing sunrises over the Grizzly Hills, or watching protodrakes swoop down and carry off woolly rhinos in the Storm Peaks (they totally do this, btw). Maybe they don’t enjoy the feeling of soaring between mountain peaks or experiencing the virtual world around them. Maybe they don’t have an attachment to the little starting village where their character first learned how to bind and use a mailbox.

But the experience would be less for a lot of other people without those things.

And what does it mean to be in a guild?

For a lot of people, a guild is their passport to group activities in game. As well as an in-game community, the guild provides a pool of people with whom to run instances. The guild may also have organised activities such as PvP or raiding.

But what if you could do all those things without a guild? What does the guild mean to people then?

And again, back to the social conundrum. The people who enjoy being in a guild will still guild up. But the people who didn’t care and were only tolerating the guild in order to get to the content may find it easier not to bother.

If the random raid PUG really takes off on a server, a lot of raid guilds will find it increasingly difficult to recruit. Why would you sign up to a guild with a fixed raid schedule when you could just log on when you had some free time and find a raid then? Maybe if you are really committed to the hard modes it would still be necessary (until Blizzard include a hard mode looking for raid interface with extra checks).

Ultimately, this really is a good thing. People shouldn’t feel forced to join guilds and work at their schedules just to get to the group content. They should join guilds because they want the community and feel of being in a guild. The game will be much more pleasant for everyone if the people who prefer not to be part of a community have the option to opt out.

I’m planning to keep a diary of my PUGs after this feature goes live, to see how it goes. I’ll run at least one random dungeon a day. So if nothing else, you’ll be able to see how I cope with the unwashed PvP-server masses … and vice versa.